News: Modo 701 Service Pack 2 is Ready

FBX 2013 loader/saver has been partially implemented. Although the FBX 2013 loader and saver are not complete, we have included them in modo 701 SP2, as they may provide users with solutions where the old FBX 2010 plug-in was failing. To use the FBX 2013 loader, you must enable it in Preferences > FBX I/O. There you will also find settings for export using FBX 2013, which is available in addition to the FBX 2010 plug-in in the export/save file types. The FBX 2013 saver is capable of exporting to match compatibility with FBX 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013.

Known issues with the FBX 2013 loader/saver:

problems with bind poses

bug with importing animation curves (tangents)

no animation import to non-transform channels or existing skeletons

no import of takes into actions

no animation export

no support for animation curve sampling on import/export

no morph map export

no polygon part or smoothing import/export

no edge smoothing import/export

no item visibility import/export

no export of “skin data” for non-Normalized folder

no support for exporting “skin data” for multiple Normalization folders

incomplete camera and light import/export

A few updates found in Service Pack 2

Improves performance with rendering scenes with tiled EXRs and cache purging (speeding up rendering of test scenes by up to 20x).

Changes UV spot size evaluation to use median value from all polygon delta-uvs instead of average values.

Changes timeline snapping to integral frame numbers if the fractional part is very close to 0 or 1, removing unnecessary interpolation due to roundoff errors.

Adds support for FX shaders in assembly preset saving.

Handles issue with sculpting on 16 bit grayscale images, where what you saw during sculpting was not what you got when reloading the vector displacement image.

Fixes Collada import from PFMatchIt, where no camera animation would import.

Fixes bug in which triangulation decisions during micropolygon dicing were based on uninitialized edge lengths when cached midpoints were used. Using correct edge lengths provides a quality improvement as well as a speedup in scenes with displacement.

Improves GeoCache baking performance.

Fixes blockiness of drag and drop highlighting in a Preview window that hasn't fully refined yet.

Changes micropolygon dicing to create triangle fans rather than Sierpinski triangles when all three edges are split. The anchor of the fan lies on the longest edge. This avoids the 'checkerboard' artifacts that have plagued displacement in modo.

Enables attached script 'beforeCreate' execution for all presets, not just materials.

Fixes bug where 'Attach Script' would silently fail without permissions to the preset directory.

Fixes bugs with render curves, where bump and normal mapping only worked with implicit UVs and incorrect texturing on non-curves in the same mesh item.